A tribute, on International Women’s Day Ellen Hutchins: pioneering young woman scientist Botany is the scientific study of plants and Ellen Hutchins is rightly regarded as the first Irish female botanist. After schooling in Dublin, around 1805, she returned home to Ballylickey, County Cork and set about her systematic pursuit of the study of plants…
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A competition to name Ireland’s new national supercomputer has been launched and Ellen Hutchins is one of six names in the hat. ‘The competition looks to shine a light on a shortlist of six pioneering Irish scientists and to educate young students about their lives and achievements’, says the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)…
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Mad About Cork added the Ellen Hutchins electrical box street art image to their collection on 20th February 2018. Mad About Cork is a guerilla group in Cork City making positive changes in derelict and run-down urban spaces through street art, guerrilla gardening, & more. The Ellen Hutchins electrical box is the latest in a…
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Team Ellen, of the Ellen Hutchins Festival, and Abarta Heritage have been busy this winter completing work on an exciting project, the Ellen Hutchins Heritage Trail. The results of the hard work have paid off, and the Trail Leaflet and Audio Guide are now available free to anyone interested in following in Ellen’s footsteps and…
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The story of a remarkable young woman. In the early years of the 19th century, in a remote corner of Ireland, a young woman in her twenties, with intermittent poor health, and mostly self taught or tutored from a distance, in the space of just eight years, made a whole series of discoveries of plants…
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The third annual Ellen Hutchins Festival took place in Bantry and the surrounding area as part of Heritage Week in August. As a legacy from the Festival, there are now two permanent displays about Ellen. One is in the Tourist Office, Bantry, which is open on Fridays through the winter, and the other is in…
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This is one of a series of posts of letters written by Ellen to her brothers and botanists in 1807. If this whets your appetite and you are interested in following the story, you might want to start at the beginning of the year and read the letters in date order. Ellen wrote to her…
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Ellen Hutchins, botanist, aged twenty one, living in Ballylickey, West Cork, wrote another letter to James Mackay of Trinity College Dublin, her third in just over two weeks. She seems to have had more to say than she had paper to write it on. Having filled the sheet completely on the front, she turned it…
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Ellen’s letters to fellow botanists are one of the most important sources of information about her life and her botanising. A handful of letters from Ellen to James Mackay of Trinity College Dublin have been found and transcribed, and feature in the exhibition open now to 28th April. 1807 was a very significant year in…
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Celebrating Ellen Hutchins: Trinity College Dublin The Ellen Hutchins exhibition in Trinity College Dublin has now closed. On display were some wonderful specimens of seaweed that Ellen collected in Bantry Bay over two hundred years ago. These are held in the Herbarium at Trinity, and are on display here for the first time ever. Alongside…
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